Black Sabbath fans love Paranoid, but Geezer Butler has an issue with the classic album’s cover.
At the recent Steel City Con (as per Ultimate Guitar), the band’s bassist reflected on their early days, revealing he never thought their self-titled debut album would lead to much success.
“We thought we’d last about two or three years at the most when we put the first album out,” he said. “Everybody completely slagged it in the press. They hated us, calling us Satanists and all this crap, because they didn’t really listen to the lyrics.”
When their second album, Paranoid, arrived later in 1970, it changed everything. Paranoid became Sabbath’s only UK No. 1 album until 2013’s 13, and the title track became one of the band’s most iconic hits.
Butler, however, wasn’t feeling the artwork.
“We thought that was a terrible cover,” he revealed. “[It came from] my manager at the time, [whom] we quickly left. I still don’t know what the cover represents. Some guy dressed up with a sword. It is the worst cover ever.”
Butler’s bandmate Tony Iommi, however, once stood up for the Paranoid artwork, noting that it came from a last-minute title change.
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“The album cover on ‘Paranoid’ has nothing to do with ‘Paranoid’ [the song],” he said in 2020. “It was going to be called ‘War Pigs’, so we had a bloke with the shield and a sword, which remotely made sense — more so than ‘Paranoid’.”
In other Sabbath news, Sharon Osbourne recently launched a fierce legal challenge against the planned release of early demo recordings from 1969, when the band still operated under the name Earth.
The recordings, captured at Zella Studios in Birmingham just months before the legendary band transformed into Black Sabbath, became the centre of an escalating copyright dispute last year.
